My most recent books are the Leader's Guide to Radical Management (2010), The Leader's Guide to Storytelling (2nd ed, 2011) and The Secret Language of Leadership (2007). I consult with organizations around the world on leadership, innovation, management and business narrative. At the World Bank, I held many management positions, including director of knowledge management (1996-2000). I am currently a director of the Scrum Alliance, an Amazon Affiliate and a fellow of the Lean Software Society. You can follow me on Twitter at @stevedenning. My website is at www.stevedenning.com.

How To Be Happy At Work

“Most of us want a better way of living and working,” an anguished colleague wrote recently, “but most of us do not know what a better way of living or working is.” He is not alone, given that over half a million people have come to read my article, “The Ten Happiest Jobs” along with “Think Your Job Is Bad? Try One Of These!”

Since tens of thousands of books have been written on these issues, any short answer is going to sound superficial. But given the widespread interest in the issue, here is a short summary of my thinking on these important questions. Important, because after all, what could be more important than deciding how to live and work?

If we want to find a better way of living and working, we need to understand (1) what is it about our current way of living and working that we don’t like? and (2) can we identify other ways of living and working that would be better?

Why are we unhappy in our work?

On (1), I believe that what makes most (big) organizations all around the world so painful is the preoccupation with efficiency and making money (or “outputs” in public sector organizations). In those organizations, which usually profess to have many values, the value of efficiency tends to win all arguments. This is soul-destroying for all involved, and paradoxically turns out to be not very efficient, i.e. it leads to behaviors that end up destroying the organization as well as dispiriting the people in it.

What is not often realized is that this way of running organizations is actually quite recent and has only been dominant for the last three decades. Understanding why and how it became dominant is a long story, on which I have written a great deal. Understanding that story is important if you want to understand why many people are unhappy in their work: most surveys show it to be around 80 percent unhappy.

The value of efficiency is pervasive. Even in conferences focused on getting better organizations, like Agile, Lean or even Stoos, you will hear people say things which show that they are (often unthinkingly) assuming that the efficiency and making money are necessarily the dominant values of any organization. Becoming aware of, and shedding, this assumption is one of the first steps to getting to a better way of living and working.

What would be a better way of living and working?

On (2), there is obviously a lot of ongoing debate.

One school of thought says: let’s list the values that we like and try to create organizations that have those values. In my experience, that doesn’t get us very far. We end up with long lists of values, but no real clarity as why these values are to be preferred over others, or whether organizations run in this way are likely to survive. It mainly leads to confusion. We end up going round and round in circles.

Another school of thought says: let’s make things more fun for the people doing the work. Engaged employees will lead to better and more profitable organizations, which will make for better living and working. That has been tried for around a hundred years. I believe that the record shows that although this often appears to work for a while, it ends up creating organizations that are not sustainable. The organizations start losing money and hence go out of business, until a preoccupation with efficiency re-emerges. This tends to take us right back to the way of living and working that we didn’t like, unless we adopt the third approach.

The third school of thought, to which Roger Martin, Fred Reichheld and a growing number of others (including me) belong, is to say: let’s focus organizations and our working lives on creating delight for others (customers, clients, users). This way of thinking and acting aligns with several thousand years of moral philosophy (caring for others is at the center of almost all moral philosophy).

It also, when properly implemented, paradoxically ends up being more efficient and more profitable than focusing on being efficient and profitable. Prominent examples of firms that are to a large extent in this mode include Apple {APPL], Amazon [AMZN], Salesforce [CRM], and Whole Foods [WFM], along with a vast number of small and medium organizations.

In these organizations, in most arguments, the value of “delighting the customer profitably” defeats the values of “efficiency” and “making money”. When push comes to shove, you do what’s right for the customer. Organizations like this tend to be more satisfying for those doing the work. In this world, efficiency is considered important but subordinated to the values of delighting customers, transparency and continuous improvement. My book on radical management and this column on Forbes spell out how all this works out in practice. All in all, I think it constitutes a better way of living and working.

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What would be a better way of living and working? Today’s women are better educated than ever before. They have accumulated a wealth of skills, have learned to be adaptable, and have been told that they can do anything they want to do. The upside is that they have become independent, self-sufficient, and confident of their abilities. The downside is that they will readily admit they have not found the enjoyment or satisfaction they once imagined. The reason they attribute to the problem is that they have taken on too much. These days, most women dance to a frenzied beat, believing just because they can, they think they should.

It’s obviously not just women who find the workplace dispiriting. Most surveys put the level of disengaged workers at around 20%. But there is another way, as suggested in this article and others in my column.

Most studies show that employee engagement and employee sat has been on the decline since quite some time. This measure may be more important for the long term health of a company than the pure financial measures. As an investor I would ask for this – however, not performed under the control of company management but by an independent provider (similar to an external audit), under the supervision of the board. A lot of business literature features interviews with top executives who describe how great things are – however looking behind the scene you will see a quite different reality. Much of this can be heard “off the record” – see also Stefan Stern’s revealing article on how unhappy even executives really are “Behind Corporate Walls the Masters of the Universe Weep” http://ind.pn/XU4IuG.

Steve Denning is absolutely right that much of this unhappiness is attributable to unhealthy short term focus and all the negative constraints coming from it. Most employees understand that it does not make sense in the longer term and serves mainly to comply or surpass some analyst consensus. However, even in the current difficult situation where shot-termism will still prevail for some time in the future we can do better – just by applying one of the basic Drucker management responsibilities i.e. placing our employees into jobs that fit best to their strengths…

Very insightful post. I really enjoyed this article. As for the third approach, I think zappos.com would agree!! I think it’s really important that we must be prepared to honestly look at if what we are doing is for money, for or for authentic interest. I think a coach is a wonderful way to support someone access this place, as so often it seems ‘we just don’t know what to do’. The people at ftrnation.com really helped me with that. I didn’t even have to change companies, it was the position. However, ironically I didn’t even notice. I appreciate the mission you take on, better working and better living! God bless!!

Last week I started reading Conscious Capitalism by Whole Foods co-founder John Mackey and Professor of Marketing Rajendra Sisodia. In Part I of the book I came across some really interesting insights on happiness.

The section explores the great work that was done in this fields of happiness and depression by Auschwitz survivor and renown psychologist Viktor Frankl (http://goo.gl/2IsPU). Frankl advocated that happiness in or outside the workplaces cannot be directly pursued, but that it is something that ensues one’s life as the result of living a life of meaning and purpose. In this way happiness is a byproduct of meaning and purpose.

What is most interesting about Frankl is that his theories of happiness are not only based on two decades of working with patients suffering from depression, but that his theories are what helped him survive one of the darkest moments in human history and help others do the same.